Very interesting. Do you have a lot of experience purchasing URLs?

Google no longer favors exact match keyword domain names like they used to. https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/251784203597910016 My belief is that easy to remember, or catchy names will remain strong in the marketplace.

Joker wrote: I think the trick to it all is working up your keywords to be as specific as possible. You want your website to have keywords in the title. That is how Google or any other search engine will find your site. If you don't have any or not enough keywords (even tags on your site), you will never rank well.

I don't know who it is, but there is someone out there in Googleland who does this. The problem is, his URL's may be keyword rich, but they seldom if ever have anything to do with the content that is put on those sites. As if he is tailoring the titles simply to get hits.

Eventually, Google is going to get wise to this and find a countermeasure to that tactic becasue that just fills the internet with garbage.

I think the trick to it all is working up your keywords to be as specific as possible. You want your website to have keywords in the title. That is how Google or any other search engine will find your site. If you don't have any or not enough keywords (even tags on your site), you will never rank well.

Goldbug wrote: This is going to cost a bit, but if he owns the original site and domain it might be worth it. If the company takes off, he doesn't want them grabbed by someone else first

That is a good point. Sometimes you have to pay so the competition isn't so competitive. I sure hope he knows what he's doing though.

FrankN wrote: I would be curious to know how much it cost for each extension.

It all depends on what the extension itself is. They can range for $1 dollar to $50 dollars. A .in extension is probably rising in price due to the insane rise in internet usage in India, while .au (Australia) might not be as much

That is a good point MONEYES, it is almost like playing the lottery here. You likely have better odds, but its still playing the chance game.

Goldbug wrote: If he's buying versions of someone else's domain, it's not worth it as far as I know. The main company won't buy it, they will just let it sit, and only take action if the content is offensive, and parked domains get dropped from search engines quickly so you're relying on mistyping for traffic.

Which is why, in my opinion, this method of trying to make money is akin to grasping at straws. Aside from making a typing mistake, you have to remember that the U.K. has different spellings of the same U.S. word......like catalog for instance.

This is going to cost a bit, but if he owns the original site and domain it might be worth it. If the company takes off, he doesn't want them grabbed by someone else first, and if he is buying international domains he can always redirect them to a country or language specific version of his site.

If he's buying versions of someone else's domain, it's not worth it as far as I know. The main company won't buy it, they will just let it sit, and only take action if the content is offensive, and parked domains get dropped from search engines quickly so you're relying on mistyping for traffic.

The strategy of registering domains that are similar to popular domains can work in certain situations when dealing with forwarding traffic to parked domains. The problem is that the methods of generating said traffic usually fall outside of most company's TOS and advertisers aren't stupid. A few years ago one could realistically have sites earning $50-$100 a day from using various techniques of forwarding traffic but those days are pretty much over. As for flipping... good luck.

Maybe he's looking at this as a long term investment strategy. It's risky from a financial perspective, which I'm sure any site flipper will tell you, so the odds are against him that he will make good money from doing this.

I would be curious to know how much it cost for each extension.

What is the content added to those URLs? I can see why big companies do this, which is to ensure traffic and clicks don't go to the wrong pages. For smaller groups, or for empty pages, this sound more like a waste of money because the target audience is still too small to reach the goal.

A buddy of mine is spending a fortune creating and buying up URLs which either have different extensions, (his is dot com so he is buying dot net and so on), as well as doing the same for any similar sounding names. So if he had a site using crunchybreakfasts dot com he will make and buy crunchyfastbreakfasts or crunchyfastbreakfaststogo. Not great examples but you get the point. He is even talking about doing this all again for misspelled versions of those already registered.

My concern is that registering all of these names is costing a fortune, so is it really worth it?